Where founders, investors, and builders shaping what’s next come together to raise capital, scale AI, and swap real stories.
Startups today are building in the middle of two huge forces: the rise of AI and the grind of fundraising. At Startup Grind, we skip the fluff and get to what matters: how founders are actually raising money, building AI-powered products, and finding investors who back bold ideas.
At its core, Startup Grind is about community—connecting people, ideas, and opportunities so startups everywhere can thrive.
April 27–29, 2026 [our 13th year!]Fox Theater, Redwood City, CA
We hope you'll join us and 5,000 others on April 28-29, 2026 to experience it firsthand.
Note: April 27 is open to Startup Exhibitors only (Apply to Exhibit your Startup here: https://www.startupgrind.tech/exhibition)
The Main event takes place on April 28-29.
Agenda
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Speakers
Tuhin Srivastava - Baseten (CEO + Co-founder)
Tuhin Srivastava is CEO and co-founder of Baseten, an AI company powering mission-critical inference. He began his career in 2009 as an Investment Banker at Macquarie Group before transitioning to machine learning engineering, where he built ML-powered products and gained firsthand experience with the challenges of deploying AI models in production environments.
As a machine learning eng…
Dave Ferguson - Nuro (Co-CEO + Co-founder)
Dave Ferguson is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Nuro, a Physical AI company bringing scalable self-driving to robotaxis, commercial fleets, and personally owned vehicles. Before starting Nuro in 2016, Dave was a principal engineer at Google's self-driving program (now Waymo), where he led the computer vision, machine learning, behavior prediction, and scene understanding teams. He also led the p…
Amjad Masad - Replit (CEO)
Amjad Masad is a Jordanian American entrepreneur and engineer. He founded Replit, a cloud-based AI-powered software development platform, and one of the fastest growing developer communities in the world. Prior to his role at Replit, Amjad worked at Facebook, where he led the JavaScript infrastructure team and contributed to popular open-source developer tools. Additionally, he played a key ro…
Adarsh Hiremath - Mercor (Co-CEO)
Adarsh Hiremath is the co-founder and co-CEO of Mercor, an AI company at the intersection of labor markets and artificial intelligence. Under his leadership, Mercor has become a trusted partner to leading AI companies and built a network of tens of thousands of professionals who help train frontier AI models for top labs and enterprises.
He attended Harvard University but left to focus o…
Gabe Pereyra - Harvey AI (President + Co-founder)
Gabe Pereyra is the President and Co-Founder of Harvey, the leading professional services platform engineered with AI for law, tax, and finance. Before founding Harvey in August 2022, Gabe was a Research Scientist at Meta and Google. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and pursued a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, fully …
Mamoon Hamid - Kleiner Perkins (Partner)
Mamoon Hamid is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins. He has been an early investor in some of the most innovative software companies of recent times including Slack, Figma, Box, and Rippling. Prior to Kleiner Perkins, Mamoon was a co-founder of Social Capital. He started his venture career in 2005 at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) where he eventually became Partner. Mamoon came to Silicon Valley in 199…
Chetan Puttagunta - Benchmark (General Partner)
Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner at Benchmark. Benchmark is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on partnering with entrepreneurs building transformational companies. He currently serves on the boards of Elastic (NYSE: ESTC), Legora, Manus, LangChain, Reducto, Levelpath, Numeral, Fomo, Modern Treasury, Airbyte, Duffel, Summation, MindsDB, and Bezi. He previously led investments in…
Tamar Yehoshua - Atlassian (Chief Product + AI Officer)
Tamar Yehoshua is Atlassian’s Chief Product and AI Officer, leading the company’s Teamwork Collection and AI strategy to help teams work smarter with AI-native products. Previously, she was President of Product and Technology at Glean, and Chief Product Officer at Slack, where she guided the company through rapid growth, a public listing, and acquisition by Salesforce. Tamar has also held lead…
Sangeen Zeb - GV (General Partner)
Sangeen is a general partner at GV, focusing on high-growth AI and enterprise investments. He works with both early and late-stage startups. Sangeen is part of the boards at Harvey, OpenEvidence, and Vercel. His other AI investments include Thinking Machines and Hebbia.
Before joining GV in 2021, Sangeen was an investor with Founders Circle Capital, where he helped lead the firm’s invest…
Harrison Chase - LangChain (CEO + Co-founder)
Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, a company formed around the open-source Python/Typescript packages that aim to make it easy to develop Language Model applications. Prior to starting LangChain, he led the ML team at Robust Intelligence (an MLOps company focused on testing and validation of machine learning models), led the entity linking team at Kensho (a fintech startup)…
Hans Tung - Notable Capital (Managing Partner)
Hans Tung is a Managing Partner at Notable Capital, where he leads the firm’s AI-driven Prosumer, Commerce, and Fintech practice. He partners closely with globally minded founders to scale category-defining companies and navigate strategic exits. His investment portfolio includes four investments with outcomes exceeding $30 billion, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Slack, and Rednote, and four valu…
Christine Tsai - 500 Global (CEO + Founding Partner)
Christine Tsai is Founding Partner and CEO of 500 Global. Since co-founding the firm in 2010, she has led its growth to $2.4B in AUM and investments in more than 3,000 companies in 80+ countries.
She has spent her entire career building and investing in Silicon Valley. Prior to 500, she was in product marketing at Google, where she helped launch and worked on early go-to-market of produc…
Jon Callaghan - True Ventures (Managing Partner + Co-founder)
Jon Callaghan is a founder, investor, and Managing Partner of True Ventures, a leading early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded in 2005. With a mission to empower entrepreneurs at the earliest stages, True has partnered with over 1,050 Founders across 500+ companies. Its 12 funds have supported seven IPOs and 60+ acquisitions. Under Jon’s leadership, True was an early institutional inves…
Rahul Vohra - Superhuman (Founder + Head of Superhuman Mail)
Rahul is the Founder and Head of Superhuman Mail, the most productive email app ever made. Prior to Superhuman, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. Rapportive was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, and is now part of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Rahul is also widely known for his expertise in product strategy and entrepreneurship. His unique approach to find…
Lin Qiao - Fireworks AI (CEO + Co-founder)
Lin Qiao is the CEO and co-founder of global AI inference cloud and infrastructure platform Fireworks AI, which enables teams like Cursor, Uber, Doordash and Shopify to build, tune, and scale highly-optimized generative AI applications. Prior to founding Fireworks, Lin was the head of Meta’s PyTorch.
Michel Tricot - Airbyte (CEO + Co-founder)
Since founding the open source data movement company in 2020, Michel has raised $181M in funding from the likes of Accel, Benchmark, and Y Combinator (bringing the company to a $1.5B valuation) with more than 7K customers, including Monday.com, Calendly, and Invesco. Prior to founding Airbyte, Michel served as Director of Engineering at rideOS and led data integrations at LiveRamp, where he he…
Anish Acharya - Andreessen Horowitz (General Partner)
Anish Acharya is an entrepreneur and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on consumer investing, including AI-native products and companies that will help usher in a new era of abundance. Anish first joined the firm in 2019 with a focus on fintech, often investing in B2C technologies. He currently serves on the boards of Clutch, Deel, HappyRobot, Mosaic, Method, The Coterie,…
Corinne Riley - Greylock (Partner)
Corinne Riley is a partner at Greylock Partners where she invests in early-stage B2B AI applications and infrastructure. At Greylock, she partners closely with companies like Braintrust Data, Baseten, Cogent Security, Common Room, Fable Security, Opal Security, and Resolve AI. Corinne also leads Greylock Edge, a bespoke 3-month company-building program designed to advance select pre-idea, pre-…
Robert Brooks - Lambda (VP of Revenue + Founding Team Member)
Robert Brooks IV is a Founding Team member and VP of Revenue at Lambda, the leading AI infrastructure company providing GPU cloud services for machine learning teams at Apple, Amazon, and the Department of Defense. He has been instrumental in scaling Lambda to a multi-hundred million dollar revenue run rate.
An operator who understands technical sales, Robert previously served as a Head …
Tanay Kothari - Wispr Flow (CEO + Co-founder)
Tanay Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Wispr, he voice-to-text AI that turns speech into clear, polished writing in every app. A four-time founder, he launched FeatherX, an AI personalization startup for online stores, while still in college. After it was acquired by Cerebra Technologies, he joined the company to lead engineering and product. Earlier, he built Convert, a music discovery pl…
Rajeev Dham - Sapphire Ventures (Partner)
Rajeev is a Partner at Sapphire Ventures and has been investing for nearly 15 years across a few dozen companies. He is focused on partnering with exceptional founders building category-defining B2B software companies in horizontal and vertical AI, as well as leading innovators in fintech and healthcare. Rajeev’s notable investments include Glean, monday.com, Square, Wise, Braze, Moveworks, Se…
Steve Jang - Kindred Ventures (Managing Partner + Founder)
Steve Jang is the Managing Partner and Founder of Kindred Ventures. Steve is a Midas List investor (top 50 in the world in 2023) whose investments include Uber, where he was an early advisor and angel investor since the company’s founding, Coinbase, Perplexity, Fal, and PlayAI. More recently, Steve has invested in startups in theme areas of consumer internet, AI, decentralized systems, infrast…
Stephanie Zhan - Sequoia Capital (Partner)
General Partner at Sequoia on the early stage team. Here to be your first and long term partner, from your angel / seed to Series A and beyond. Serve on the boards of Linear, Middesk, Rec Room, Reflection AI, Ricursive Intelligence, Skild AI. Also: Tavus, Mach, Evy. On quest for superintelligence.
Tomasz Tunguz - Theory Ventures (Founder)
Tomasz Tunguz is the founder of Theory Ventures, investing in early-stage enterprise AI, data, and blockchain companies. Previously, Tomasz was a Redpoint Ventures GP and a product manager at Google, managing a billion dollar business unit on the AdSense team. As an investor, he’s worked with eight unicorns predominantly in data and data infrastructure, including Looker, Monte Carlo, Dremio, H…
Rachel Wolan - Webflow (Chief Product Officer)
Rachel Wolan is Chief Product Officer at Webflow and oversees the company’s product, design and insights teams. With over two decades of experience leading product, engineering, design, and data teams, Rachel brings a wealth of expertise to her role. Before joining Webflow, she served as VP and GM of Dropbox’s Core Business. Her leadership was instrumental in shaping Dropbox’s AI strategy, inc…
Immad Akhund - Mercury (CEO + Co-founder)
Immad Akhund is the CEO of Mercury, the fintech that provides radically different banking* for over 200,000 ambitious companies and individuals. He co-founded the company in 2017 with the vision that banking should do more than safely hold money — it should help people accomplish everything they want with it. Launched in 2019, Mercury has raised $500M in total funding from Sequoia, Coatue, CRV…
Navin Chaddha - Mayfield Fund (Managing Partner)
Grant Lee - Gamma (CEO + Co-founder)
Grant Lee is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gamma, an AI-powered presentation and website design tool that has scaled to 50 million customers and $50M in ARR with fewer than 50 employees. A Stanford-trained engineer with a background in finance and operations, Grant spent much of his early career creating countless slide decks, a pain point that inspired him to found Gamma and reimagine how people …
Stefano Ermon - Inception (CEO + Co-founder)
Stefano Ermon is the co-inventor behind diffusion models and the Co-Founder/CEO of Inception, where he leads the development of Mercury—the first commercially available diffusion language model. His work extends diffusion from images and video to high-performance text generation, delivering 5–10x faster inference with significantly lower compute costs. He previously helped advance foundational…
Kobie Fuller - Upfront Ventures (General Partner)
Kobie has been a General Partner at Upfront since 2016, with a core investing focus on AI, enterprise SaaS and immersive XR platforms. With over two decades of experience in venture capital, Kobie has held key positions at leading firms, including Accel, OpenView Venture Partners, and Insight Venture Partners, where he made early investments incompanies such as Exact Target (which was sold to …
Mitesh Agrawal - Positron AI (CEO)
Mitesh Agrawal is the CEO of Positron AI, which builds specialized silicon designed for ultra-efficient AI inference - the deployment phase where models run in production. He previously served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Lambda, where he was instrumental in scaling the AI cloud infrastructure company’s revenue to a massive run rate.
At Positron, Mitesh is focused on solving a…
Sundeep Peechu - Felicis (Managing Partner)
As a Managing Partner and founding member of Felicis, Sundeep led Felicis' investments in several companies such as Mercor, Coalition, Plaid, and Komodo Health, as well as the following companies that have gone public: Ginkgo Bioworks, Matterport, Recursion Pharma, and Wish. Before joining Felicis in 2010, Sundeep joined Intel through the acquisition of Sarvega, where he was an early employee …
Karri Saarinen - Linear (CEO + Co-founder)
Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Previously, he was Principal Designer and design systems lead at Airbnb and created the founding design at Coinbase. Originally from Finland, Karri lives in Southern California.
Kanyi Maqubela - Kindred Ventures (Managing Partner)
Kanyi serves as Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. He focuses his investment and formation work in theme areas including frontier technology, digital health, e-commerce, financial technology, supply-chain/logistics. He currently serves a number of startups as a lead investor, including Adyton, Basis Theory, Faircraft, Cloudtrucks, Goldfinch, and Tala. He previously led or participated in th…
Frédérique Dame - GV (General Partner)
Frédérique is a General Partner at GV. Frédérique is a consumer investor focusing on social commerce and digital health; she leads the firm's Women’s Health investment team. With 15 years of experience in product development, she has a proven track record of scaling both startups and public companies. Notably, she was a key leader at Uber, overseeing its massive global expansion from 80 to ove…
Avlok Kohli - AngelList (CEO)
Avlok Kohli has served as CEO of AngelList since 2019, growing it into venture capital's leading infrastructure platform for fund managers, investors, and founders, now supporting over $171 billion in assets. A serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits, Avlok previously founded Fastbite (acquired by Square in 2015) and Fairy (acquired by Postmates in 2019). A software engineer by trai…
Ilya Fushman - Kleiner Perkins
Abhinav Asthana - Postman (CEO)
Abhinav Asthana is founder and CEO of API platform Postman. He has scaled the company to more than 40 million developers over 500,000 companies worldwide. Abhinav started his first business while still in school, providing web development services to small businesses, and expanded his professional experience with a stint at Yahoo! He co-founded TeliportMe and served as CTO there, before launch…
Derek Andersen - Bevy + Startup Grind (CEO + Co-founder)
For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012 Startup Grind has hosted 10,000…
Anna Patterson - Ceramic (CEO + Co-founder)
Anna Patterson is the co-founder and CEO of Ceramic.ai, a company building search infrastructure purpose-built for large language models. Previously, Anna spent more than a decade at Google, where she served as Vice President of Engineering and was instrumental in architecting and scaling Google’s core search indexing systems, including TeraGoogle. A three-time founder with two successful acqu…
Ann Bordetsky - NEA, Rival, Uber, Twitter (Early Stage Investor)
Serial startup operator (two unicorns, two startups exits) and active angel investor. Previously Partner at NEA (global early stage VC with >600 tech exits), Chief Operating Officer at Rival, Business Development exec at Uber, Twitter and in-the-trenches builder of two pioneering climate and mobility startups. Often helping founders with building scaling organizations, expansion and partner…
Ivan Poupyrev - Archetype AI (CEO + Founder)
Ivan Poupyrev, Ph.D., is the Co-founder and CEO of Archetype AI, with over 20 years of experience transforming research and development into innovative products. An award-winning inventor, engineer and technical leader, he brings deep expertise in spatial computing and interaction design, advanced sensors and natural interaction, mobile and wearable devices. Prior to Archetype, Ivan led the de…
Matt Stephenson - Bain Capital Ventures (Head of Tech Talent)
Matt is the Head of Tech Talent at Bain Capital Ventures, where he partners with early-stage founders to build enduring businesses. He brings over 15 years of experience building recruiting functions, scaling organizations, and refining hiring processes that unlock growth. At BCV, Matt works closely with founders to instill scalable, authentic hiring practices and develop talent strategies ali…
Maithra Raghu - Samaya AI (CEO + Founder)
Maithra Raghu is the Founder & CEO of Samaya AI, the Expert Intelligence platform for financial services. Samaya enables users to create powerful, personalized AI Agents that can execute complex financial knowledge work with expert level quality. Backed by NEA, Eric Schmidt, and AI leaders such as Jeff Dean and Yann LeCun, Samaya is reshaping how finance professionals leverage AI. Recogniz…
Joe Dormani - Thomson Reuters Ventures (Partner)
Joe is currently a Partner at Thomson Reuters Ventures, a $250M corporate venture fund where he leads a team of global investors. As an investor, Joe specializes in machine learning, enterprise automation, and vertical SaaS startups. He has led over a dozen startup investments and M&A deals valued in the hundreds of millions, driven strategy for multi-billion-dollar organizations, and help…
Ceci Stallsmith - Lovable (Head of Marketing)
Ceci (CC) Stallsmith is a developer-first marketing leader with a career spanning high-growth platforms, venture investing, and company building. She began her career in Developer Relations at Box, where she launched the company’s mobile ecosystem and scaled it from zero to hundreds of applications. She later joined Bessemer Venture Partners, investing in developer tools like npm.
Drawn …
Tiffany Luck - NEA (Partner)
Tiffany joined NEA in 2023 as a Partner on the technology team focused on early-stage AI. Previously, Tiffany was a Partner at GGV Capital investing in B2B SaaS. Tiffany started her career in marketing and business development, with roles at Forbes, Lot18 and Amazon, and also worked on Morgan Stanley's Technology Investment Banking team. Tiffany received a BA from the University of Virginia an…
Soyoung Lee - TwelveLabs (Head of GTM + Co-founder)
Soyoung leads the company’s enterprise growth and strategic partnerships. She has played a central role in bringing TwelveLabs' video foundation models to leading global enterprises by driving collaborations with industry giants such as NVIDIA and AWS. Soyoung has been instrumental in scaling the company’s reach across industries like sports, media, and entertainment, delivering AI-powered vid…
Matt Kraning - Menlo Ventures (Partner)
Matt Kraning is a partner at Menlo Ventures focused on AI, enterprise SaaS, national defense, and cybersecurity—areas where he has both built and sold.
Before Menlo, he co-founded and served as CTO of Expanse, a category-creating data and cybersecurity company that Palo Alto Networks acquired for $1.25 billion.His experience spans company building and creating multiple “0→1” techn…
Philip W. Braddock - Atlassian (Head of Atlassian for Startups)
Whether inside or outside the office, Philip is passionate about connecting with people in ways that are truly meaningful (not just tactical). He never hesitates to get up in front of a crowd, which his wife finds both admirable and embarrassing. When not at work, you can find him spending time with his family, traveling to new places or swimming, biking, running, or skiing -- his own personal…
Brian Rothenberg - defy.vc (Partner)
Brian Rothenberg is an Investment Partner at Defy and a former founder, operator, and growth leader. He helped scale Eventbrite into the world’s largest event technology platform, serving as VP of Growth, CMO, and VP/GM as the company grew to millions of users, $300M in revenue, and a NYSE IPO. Brian previously co-founded SkillSlate (acquired by TaskRabbit) and was one of Yahoo’s youngest prod…
Wen Sang - Genspark.ai (COO + Co-founder)
Wen Sang is the Co-Founder and COO of Genspark.ai, a Palo Alto-based AI company building agents for 1B+ global knowledge workers. Following the launch of its Super Agent suite in April 2025, Genspark grew from 0 to $50M ARR within 5 months. The company has since raised $435M (backed by Emergence Capital Partners, LG, SBI, UpHonest, and Temasek's Pavilion Capital) over the past 20 months. Previ…
Nurasyl Serik - RemoFirst (CEO + Co-founder)
Nurasyl Serik is the Co-Founder and CEO of RemoFirst, a global Employer of Record platform enabling companies to compliantly hire and pay international talent in 185+ countries. Originally from Kazakhstan, Nurasyl brings a strong track record in product and company building. Before launching RemoFirst in 2021, Nurasyl and co-founder Volodymyr Fedoriv successfully founded and exited Felix Math,…
Sarah Ramos - Base10 Partners (Head of Marketing)
Sarah is the Head of Marketing at Base10.
Sarah joined Base10 in 2020 as Head of Data Visualization & Investment Content.Prior to Base10, Sarah was in content and product marketing TripActions, a corporate travel management software company, where she created thought leadership, customer marketing, and product marketing content.Sarah graduated summa cum laude from the U…
Lindsay Amos - Amos Comms + The Platform Team (Founder)
Lindsay is the founder of Amos Comms, where she advises startup founders and investors on communications strategy, and the To Do List Summit, an invite-only, hands-on event focused on founder-led marketing. From 2018 to 2024, she led communications at Y Combinator (YC), helping build the YC brand and advising more than 3,000 startups on narrative, launches, and media. Earlier, she was one of t…
Joan DeGennaro - The Platform Team + Scale Venture Partners (Founder + Director of Community & Events)
Joan is the founder of the To Do List Summit, an invite-only, hands-on event focused on founder-led marketing. She is also the Director of Community & Events at Scale Venture Partners and plans and hosts high-impact events for startups, spanning marketing, recruiting, and community building. Previously, she spent five years at Y Combinator working on Startup School, Co-Founder Matching, an…
Lindsay Selvitelle - ls /events + The Platform Team (Founder)
Lindsay is the founder of ls /events and the To Do List Summit, an invite-only, hands-on event focused on founder-led marketing. Most recently, she was Senior Director of Events at Y Combinator, where she spent five years planning and executing batch retreats, alumni reunion weekends, investor receptions, community events, and revamped Demo Days at the iconic SF Masonic. Before YC, she was the…
Maria LaMagna - Press Publish Studio + The Platform Team (Founder)
Maria is the founder of Press Publish Studio and the To Do List Summit, an invite-only, hands-on event focused on founder-led marketing. From 2022 to 2025, she was Head of Social Media at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), leading the firm’s presence on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram and partnering closely with marketing and communications leaders across each vertical. She also advised a16z portfolio com…
Fabiola Quinzaños - Monashees (Partner)
Fabiola Quinzanos joined Monashees in 2021, focusing on fintech, climatech, and consumer-oriented companies. She works closely with portfolio companies including Fintoc, Inventa, Nowports, Slope, and Yuno, and leads Monashees’ on-the-ground operations in Mexico. Prior to Monashees, Fabiola worked in private equity in the U.S. and Mexico, with a focus on technology and sustainability. She is ba…
Mike Duboe - Greylock (General Partner)
Mike brings a growth-focused mindset to early-stage investments in commerce, marketplace, and vertical software businesses.
Matt Hammel - AirOps (COO + Co-founder)
Matt Hammel is a Co-Founder and COO at AirOps. He's passionate about helping teams and individuals run more data-driven businesses.
Before AirOps, Matt spent four years at Bungalow, a real estate technology platform, where he served as VP of BizOps, and later VP of Customer, overseeing all customer-facing functions (sales, customer success, customer support, and pricing). Prior to Bungal…
Hosted By
James Gee, Global Partnerships Manager
I recently relocated from the UK to Silicon Valley to expand Startup Grind's sales and partnership program, collaborating closely with Derek bringing fresh ideas and forge new connections that will fuel future growth.
I'm also an entrepreneur at heart, launching my own startup in 2015, experiencing the thrilling highs and challenging lows of being a founder firsthand. This unique perspective fuels my excitement for connecting with founders and partners at the 2024 Global Conference. Beyond the world of startups, I am an avid sports fan, whether it's playing or watching a game. If you're in the Bay Area, don't hesitate to reach out - as I’d be thrilled to join you for a game!
Derek Andersen, Chapter Organizer
For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. Bevy has raised $60M from Accel, Upfront Ventures, and others. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012 Startup Grind has hosted 20,000 events. In 2010 he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked as a product manager at Electronic Arts. He currently lives in Palo Alto CA with his wife and four children.
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Global Partner
Carta (http://www.carta.com/launch?utm_campaign=20240423-nam-general-smb-startup_grind_partnership&utm_medium=social&utm_source=startup_grind)
Carta helps people manage equity, build businesses, and invest in the companies of tomorrow. Carta Launch is the only free cap table product, helping new founders get started. The company is trusted by more than 40,000 companies, over 7,000 funds and SPVs, and over two million equity holders to manage cap tables, compensation, valuations, liquidity, and more. For more information, visit carta.com.
Presenting
Mayfield Fund (https://mayfield.ai)
Mayfield is an early-stage venture capital firm with a people-first philosophy and $3 billion under management. The firm has a proven track record of partnering with founders starting at the inception stage to help build iconic enterprise, AI-first, deeptech and human and planetary health companies. Mayfield has invested in more than 550 companies, resulting in 120 IPOs and more than 225 acquisitions. Some recent notable investments include HashiCorp, Lyft, Poshmark, Mammoth Biosciences, Marketo
Gold
Carta (http://www.carta.com/launch?utm_campaign=20240423-nam-general-smb-startup_grind_partnership&utm_medium=social&utm_source=startup_grind)
Carta helps people manage equity, build businesses, and invest in the companies of tomorrow. Carta Launch is the only free cap table product, helping new founders get started. The company is trusted by more than 40,000 companies, over 7,000 funds and SPVs, and over two million equity holders to manage cap tables, compensation, valuations, liquidity, and more. For more information, visit carta.com.
Silvers
Snowflake (https://www.snowflake.com)
Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud - a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds.
TriNet (https://www.trinet.com/startupgrind?utm_source=event&utm_medium=learnmore&utm_campaign=startupgrind&campaign_id=701Nr00000UKKXeIAP&lead_source=marketing-event-sponsorship&assetID=RegPage)
TriNet provides full-service HR solutions so you get time back to focus on your business, your employees get HR support, and your business gains HR guidance it needs.
Descope (https://www.descope.com/)
Descope is a drag & drop customer authentication and identity management platform. Our no / low code workflows help startups easily create and customize the entire user journey – including signup, login, MFA, access control, and user invites. We abstract away the complexity of authentication so that app builders can focus on their core product. Hundreds of companies and thousands of developers use Descope to improve user onboarding, enhance login security, and save engineering time.
Vanta (https://www.vanta.com/solutions/startup?utm_campaign=vanta_for_startups&utm_source=exhibitor-profile&utm_medium=event)
Thousands of fast-growing companies trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months.
By offering the most in-demand frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports needed to mitigate risks, prove security, and build trust to accelerate growth.
RemoFirst (https://www.remofirst.com/)
RemoFirst is a global Employer of Record (EOR) and contractor management platform that helps companies employ international talent compliantly in 185+ countries, without setting up local entities. The platform combines transparent pricing, local expertise, and a simple, self-serve experience built for fast-growing teams. Built by a startup, for startups, with pricing starting at $199/mo.
Atlassian (https://atlassian.com/startups)
Atlassian's mission is to unleash the potential of every team. With Atlassian for Startups, it's never too early to start with Atlassian!
Customer.io (https://customer.io/solutions/startups)
Customer.io is a customer engagement platform designed for organizations to create personalized customer journeys that engage, convert, and scale. Orchestrate messages across all channels, including email, in-app, SMS, push, and webhooks. Over 7,400+ companies, including Notion, Typeform, and Angi, rely on Customer.io to power their messaging needs.
Mercury (https://www.mercury.com?utm_source=event&utm_medium=sponsored_event&utm_campaign=25q2_startup_grind_conference)
Mercury offers powerful banking,* credit cards, and financial software to over 200K ambitious companies. Mercury believes banking should do more than hold money — it should help you perform at your highest level. Visit mercury.com to learn more.
*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC. The IO Card is issued by Patriot Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard
Adobe (https://www.adobe.com/)
Adobe is the global leader in digital media and digital marketing solutions. Our creative, marketing and document solutions empower everyone – from emerging artists to global brands – to bring digital creations to life and deliver immersive, compelling experiences to the right person at the right moment for the best results. In short, Adobe is everywhere, and we’re changing the world through digital experiences.Adobe is the global leader in digital media and digital marketing solutions.
McGill Dobson Center (https://www.mcgill.ca/dobson/)
We are the hub of entrepreneurship at McGill with the mission to teach, coach, and support entrepreneurs stemming from McGill’s 11 faculties, 13 schools, and 35 research centers as they seek to build innovative companies with a purpose.
Bronzes
SpringboardNY (https://springboardny.org/)
We help those who help entrepreneurs. The WNY community envisions a cohesive, interconnected, and inclusive network of people, organizations, and resources that form the backbone of a thriving ecosystem supported by Springboard. Springboard connects, convenes, catalyzes, and strengthens the organizations serving entrepreneurs in this ecosystem. This strategy is key to propelling regional growth and contributing to place-based community and economic development.
Designli (https://designli.co/)
Designli helps non-technical SaaS and startup founders build and scale custom software with clarity, confidence, and peace of mind. We offer full-time, founder-aligned product teams who speak both code and human. Whether starting from scratch or recovering from a messy build, we guide you through prototyping, custom development, and product strategy. Our tech team specializes in mobile apps, web apps, and UX/UI design, delivering clean code and intuitive experiences without the stress. No contra
Aspire (https://aspireapp.com/us/startup-grind)
Aspire is the finance stack for global founders. We help founders build, run, and scale in the US and beyond. Multi-currency, multi-market, multi-timezone — Aspire does business like you do.
Headquartered in Singapore, Aspire serves 50,000 clients globally across 30+ markets and is backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, and PayPal.
IDA Ireland (https://www.idaireland.com)
IDA Ireland is Ireland’s inward investment agency, partnering with global companies to scale in Europe. We help ambitious businesses build, grow, and innovate in Ireland — connecting them to world-class talent, a strong R&D ecosystem, and the EU market, with hands-on support from first landing to long-term growth.
Qapita (https://www.qapita.com/)
Qapita is a Cap Table & Equity Management Platform trusted by 3,000+ companies across Asia and now rapidly expanding in the U.S. A mature platform with advanced capabilities, Qapita is a compelling and cost-effective alternative to existing rigid tools. Strong service & support is provided along with flexibility to ventures as they grow and scale.
CodeLaunch (https://codelaunch.com/campaign/startup-grind/)
CodeLaunch is the only startup accelerator that gives founders FREE professional software development—without taking equity. Finalists get paired with expert dev teams to build out their product, then pitch on the “venturetainment” stage in front of investors, VCs, and startup leaders at a high-energy pitch competition designed to generate real traction and opportunities for growth.
Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. We host monthly events in more than 600 cities and 125+ countries featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share personal stories and lessons learned on the road to building great companies. Our monthly fireside chat interviews, startup mixers and annual conferences provide ample opportunities to connect with amazing startups and the people behind them, tap into a strong support network, form meaningful connections and gain inspiration for the startup journey ahead. For more information visit StartupGrind.com or follow us on twitter @StartupGrind.
Complete your event RSVP here: https://www.startupgrind.com/events/details/startup-grind-silicon-valley-san-francisco-bay-area-presents-startup-grind-conference/.
